Comment by bee_rider
4 months ago
I do somewhat worry that AI will harm language development.
Boilerplate… is bad, right? If our languages were more elegant, we’d need less of it. It is necessary because things don’t have sane defaults or sufficient abstraction.
In particular, if the AI is able to “guess” what boilerplate you wanted, that boilerplate ought to be knowable beforehand (because the AI is not actually guessing, it is a deterministic set of rules where you type things and programs come out; it is a programming language, albeit a weirdly defined one).
I think there will be an ossification of current languages/frameworks/libraries. The technologies that already have a large amount of documentation, tutorials, example code, etc. will have a huge advantage over a brand new language because all of that content will be in the pretraining for all LLMs. Would you rather use JavaScript/TypeScript and Python (which will work relatively well with LLMs), or some brand new thing that will barely work at all with LLMs.
tbf that applies pre-AI as well.
>Boilerplate… is bad, right?
It's tough to say in a vacuum. Generally, the lower level you go, the more "boilerplate" you'll need. That cost of iteration is to give such programmers more control over the task.
So python may sneer at such boilerplate. Whereas Rust would prefer being more verbose.